


Luminous Beings

by DestielsDestiny



Category: Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Joseph Bell Series - David Pirie, Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Wings, Arthur Doyle gets a Hug, Bamf Bell, But that doesn't stop Arthur from trying, Character Study, Existential Angst, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Joe's wings defy description, M/M, Multi, Period Typical Attitudes to Mental Health Issue, Philosophy, Platonic Soulmates, Polyamory, Referenced Blood and Injury, Referenced mutilation, Religion, Somehow Bell only has one line in this, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:27:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28299690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: Wings are ephemeral entities, as frequently solid to the touch as they are vanishing to the naked eye.
Relationships: Arthur Conan Doyle/Elspeth Scott, Joseph Bell & Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Bell/Edith Murray
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Luminous Beings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plumedy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumedy/gifts).



> Wing fic. For reasons that escape me, because this isn’t one of my usual jams/obsessions, but I’ve been having a LOT of feelings about Wings lately. So here is, like, ALL the wings. 
> 
> The world building in this is sporadic at best. Just. Soulmates can be platonic, familial, romantic, and everything in between. When thinking about wings, colours are important, as are emotions, but they aren’t the whole picture. Or the whole story.

It ends as it began.

With falling.

00

 _Arthur’s hands are slick on the porous surface of the cliff face, sweat and blood mixing with gravel and grit and making his skin_ scream _._

_Neill is a taunting shadow hovering far above him, blotting out the shafts of sun breaking through the rain, filling and clouding Arthur’s vision as surely as the persistent drizzle that continues to fall all about them._

_He lost sight of Bell long since. At his back, the roar of surf on rock clashes with the cruel screams of the gulls, taunting his ears and making his chest throb with terror and grief._

_Neill swoops low, his coverts clipping the edge of Arthur’s cheek, a line of blood welling up bright and red and agonizing. “What’s the matter Artie, having trouble finding your wings?”_

_The hiss of breath was hot against his neck, and Arthur’s shoulders bunched with the effort to manifest his wings, to knock Neill back, to steady his grip or his balance, to do_ anything _._

_A gull’s scream was swallowed in the crash of a wave so wide and great, it sent spray misting across their backs._

_Neill wheeled away, cursing the salt soaking his feathers a darker rouge in the shafts of sunlight._

_For a moment, sudden loss of weight and shadow was breathtaking in its freedom._

_And then his hands slipped, and Arthur was falling._

00

Chaotic. It was the only word there was for describing his father’s wings. Always in motion, never still, never peaceful.

Never at rest, even in sleep.

It is one of the earliest certainties in young Arthur’s world. One of the only certainties.

The knowledge that there is something terribly wrong with his father’s wings.

That there is something terribly wrong with his father.

He remembers the feathers that would strew across the floor at all hours of the day and night, Arthur’s small fingers running over the blue flecks in the ocean of grey-black, trying to feel any tingle of warmth that might have remained.

He never found anything, save a cold emptiness that unsettled him to his very core.

Often times, Arthur suspects that might be his earliest clear recollection of any emotion at all, that cold emptiness.

That _lack_.

Of feeling, of warmth.

Of life.

00

_Wings and Souls are inextricably interlinked._

_Arthur would give anything for that not to be true._

00

Neill’s wings are red, the red of velvet and wine, the red of deep sunsets and bright sunrises.

The red of blood, viscous and slow, fresh and flowing, dry and sticky. An entire spectrum of ever shifting feathers and light.

Arthur is mesmerized by them from the moment he is introduced to Neill.

Not for the colour, for all that it is decidedly unusual, and not for the pretentious way Neill flaunts them every chance he gets, for all that that is decidedly usual.

But for what they represent, for their apparent perfection and beauty. For their apparent _health._

As a boy of seventeen, those wings gave Arthur hope.

In the years that follow, those wings haunt his dreams.

Dreams where feathers as red as the dawn shine with health and love, where they don’t vanish into the darkness with the flick of a wing and the taunt of a cruel laugh.

Dreams where feathers as purple as the dusk shine with life and luster, where they don’t fade to dust on the floor of a cottage steps from the sea.

Dreams where his wings come when he wills them, where nothing hurts and all is bright and light.

00

In the darkest of nights, when is seems to Arthur as if the dawn will never come again, he knows that Elspeth is not the only soulmate he lost that day.

00

Arthur’s wings appear again in his seventeenth year, healthy and hale and whole, as if they had never been hurt, never been broken. 

He and Elspeth are running across the sand, laughter floating along the wind, snatched away by the spray of the sea.

He no longer recalls which of them stumbled first, her wings a vibrant purple in the morning light as they curled forward and about him to cushion his fall.

Protecting, holding, caressing.

Swirls of red and purple, of white and black, of day and night and neither, appear between one breath and the next.

Arthur’s breath catches in his throat, choking the words from his tongue and the warmth from his chest.

Elspeth’s wings brush his without a moment’s hesitation, her eyes deep as the sea, her heart as vast as the sky, her lips gentle and steady on his cheek.

“They are beautiful, Arthur. You are beautiful.”

And in that moment, for that moment, he believes her.

00

Bell keeps a feather in his waistcoat, tucked close to his heart.

Doyle is not meant to glimpse it. Does not mean to glimpse it.

Does not glimpse it, in fact. Not for years.

But when the moment comes, standing on South Sea pier, Bell a shaken and bloodied but breathing force under Arthur’s watchful eyes and questing hands, Warner’s sixteen-foot wingspan an orange wall pressing the criminals to the slick wood, when a glimpse of iridescent green slips out amongst the black and grey of wool and tweed and leather, for all that Arthur has never laid eyes on it before, somehow, he’s always known it was there.

00

_Wings vanish with death. Except when they don’t._

00

Sam Fergusson is a conundrum Arthur Doyle lacks the cruelty—sadistic or masochistic—to ever try to solve. Arthur, who grew up hiding wings that ached, that bled, that shed, that _hurt_. Arthur, who watched his father succumb to madness, his mother to grief.

Who watched the wings that once sheltered him, that brushed away his tears, watched them shrivel and age and _crumble_ , until there was nothing left between them but dust and time and _pain_.

But from the moment he meets the man, Arthur does something he hasn’t done since he was a small boy with a father whose wings never stopped _changing_.

He shuts his eyes and stops himself from asking. From even wondering.

Because Sam Fergusson _has no wings_.

Not in the way Arthur has no wings, hunched shoulders and hidden pain following a step behind him through every moment of every day and every night.

Not in the way Bell has no wings, wind and objects and people moving and yielding in the wake of displaced air and concealed power that accompanied the man wherever he strode.

But in the way that he, simply, _had no wings._

Doyle has never much believed the Jesuit Fathers talk of sin and penance and Hell. Has never much believed in the metaphysics of the Greek philosophers, nor the idealism of the Renaissance thinkers, for that matter.

But he thinks of his mother, of his father, of feathers that turn to dust and pain that turns to silence, and he doesn’t let himself ask, doesn’t let himself think, _whom did you lose._

Fergusson finds Doyle after the sham that was the Blaney funeral, settling beside Arthur’s bowed form on the cemetery bench with a sigh and a proffered flask.

Arthur takes the flask in his hands, turning it this way and that, but is not able to bring himself to drink. Fergusson does not comment.

When the silence stretches and the sunlight begins to wane, Arthur chances a glance through the hair falling in his face.

Sam Fergusson has some of the saddest eyes Arthur Doyle has ever beheld.

He still doesn’t allow himself to wonder. To ask.

“Have you ever seen Bell’s wings, Doctor Doyle?” As questions went, that was just about as blunt and gauche as they came.

Arthur blinked. “Sir, I hardly think this is an appropriate—” When he was Bell’s clerk, it was his peers who asked. Then his mother, his brothers and sisters, then detectives and sergeants they worked with, then other professors, then patients, colleagues, friends.

Bell never told him what to say, never spoke of it. Doyle never asked. Shut down every inquiry, every question, no matter ill intent or lack of it. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t appropriate. It wasn’t his story to tell.

It wasn’t his story to _know_. Arthur had always believed that, still believed that, even sitting hunched forward on this bench, his grief for his father a raw wound that throbbed along his back with every breath he took.

Fergusson shrugged his shoulders together. The movement looked painful. His hands rose in a manner that might have been placating, from another man, a lesser man. “Doyle. Have _you_ ever seen Joe’s wings?”

His eyes were implacable as his tone was challenging. _Don’t pretend to have fewer brains than God gave you, lad._

Joseph Bell did not suffer fools to be his students, never mind his clerks. And for all that this was the first actual, proper conversation Arthur had ever had with Sam Fergusson, he’d know Bell six years too long to doubt for one moment the evidence of his observations.

He _knew_ that he was talking to one of Bell’s oldest friends. Perhaps even to his best friend.

“Why do you call him Joe, Sir?” Something slated across Fergusson’s face, there and gone in a moment. Arthur thought it might have been respect.

A large hand gestured at the flask still clasped in Doyle’s hands. “Give that back to Joe for me, would you, lad.” And then with a painful lurch from sitting to standing, awkward and overbalanced where Arthur just _knew_ there would have once been poise and grace, he was gone, leaving Arthur alone with the graves and the ghosts.

Twilight was fading into dusk, but Arthur could make out the engraving etched into the flask as much by touch as by sight.

_To my darling Joe,_

_With all of my love, Edie_

00

There’s a picture in Bell’s chambers. It travels with him wherever he goes, from Edinburgh to South Sea and beyond.

Arthur never looks at it too closely. It is not his place. Has never been and will never be.

But somehow, even without ever looking, he just knows that the uniformed boy in that photograph had wings as golden and majestic as the mightiest of eagles.

00

When Arthur was much younger, and much crueler, he asked his mother is his father was her soulmate.

It was a question born out of innocence and curiosity, as much as confusion and fear.

Mary had gazed at her son for a moment that stretched for an eternity.

It is one of the few moments in his childhood that Arthur can remember having his mother’s complete, undivided attention.

It is not a moment he ever attempts to repeat.

His mother’s wings are shriveled things, even in those tender years he can see that; see how they are already shedding, their once vibrant sky-blue fading with every passing day. Sees the stiffness in her every movement, the hollowness in her every glance.

“There are many ways to lose a soulmate, Artie.” Arthur is five years old when he realizes that soulmates are a permeable concept.

Something that can be _lost_.

Something that can be _changed_.

Arthur sneaks into his father’s study that night, gazing at drawing of faeries with wings in every shade of blue.

His little fingers trace the lines over and over, until the feathers seem to move before his very eyes.

Even in those tender years, Artie Doyle is long since past the age of believing in wishes that come true, or miracles that might happen.

But he holds those drawings close to his heart all the same, and as he drifts off to sleep, he dreams of a world where all was light and bright and hopeful. A world where all wounds could be healed.

Even those of the soul.

00

_Wings don’t change, in hue or shade or colour. Except when they do._

00

Innes is born when Arthur is days away from turning fourteen, his tiny wings as blue as the summer sky.

Arthur spends that entire summer waiting for his mother’s wings to come back to life, waiting for his mother to show more than a passing interest in this little reflection of her own soul.

By the Fall of Innes’ third year of life, his wings are as deep blue as the ocean. Their mother’s have almost faded from view entirely.

By the time he enrolls in University, Arthur has stopped believing in the power of soulmates.

00

Then he meets Elspeth.

00

_Wings echo the colour of their soul’s mate. Except when the don’t._

00

Wings, as a general rule, cannot bleed. They can shed light, colour, feathers, energy, some even argue fragments of the soul. But they cannot shed blood.

Wings, as a general rule, are not supposed to be pinioned.

Even at ten years old, Arthur knows that with the same burning certainty he knows he will never believe the Fathers' words of fire and damnation.

Will never believe that _his_ father is damned to hell. No matter what his wings look like.

Will never believe that _he_ is damned to hell. No matter what his wings do not look like.

00

_Wings are the most sacred thing in the universe._

_Arthur would give anything for that to be true._

00

Wings are ephemeral entities, as frequently solid to the touch as they are vanishing to the naked eye.

When the police have gone, when Elspeth has been taken away, when Neill is in the wind, Arthur wanders out onto the sand.

He gazes at the ocean until his face is numb with cold, until his legs no longer hold him, and his breath comes in short, soundless gasps.

Until the rain turns from a drizzle to a downpour, and the sky darkens with night.

Bell stands at his side through it all, kneeling in the sand when he falls, gathering him close when he breaks.

Warmth pulses against his cheek where it finds purchase atop Bell’s waistcoat, over his heart.

A gloved hand soothes through Arthur’s hair, a low murmur that might have been words echoing from Bell’s frame into his, if the surf and his sobs had not snatched all sound from the world.

Arthur’s wings _ache_ with the need to appear, to touch, to sooth. To _be_.

Blood trickles down his back, spilling onto the sand.

Tears and rain blur his eyes beyond hope of clear sight, but he knows that the wings that encircle his shoulders, that stand between him and the world, he _knows_ that they are not the iridescent green of a hummingbird.

Not the gold of an eagle, or the white of an angel. Not the red of blood, or the purple of violets.

Not the blue of the sea, or the orange of autumn leaves.

But in that moment, as Joe Bell stands between him and a depth-less abyss of grief and loss, Arthur has never felt anything more beautiful.

00

_The hands that catch Arthur’s are steady and sure, as steady and sure as the pulse of warmth that sinks into his chest._

_Arthur knows the name for that one._

_Joseph Bell’s eyes are as haunted and wild as his grip is gentle and calm. At their backs, his wings blink into view with a gust of wind that displaces the rain about them, shaking cool, clean droplets across Arthur’s face._

_For all its timidity, the winter sun glows off the brightness of a span that would rival the most majestic of eagle’s. Droplets catch on each feather, a kaleidoscope of colour and light that puts the very stars in the sky to shame._

_Bell’s voice is rough with cold, the words nearly snatched away among the cry of the gulls and howls of the wind._

_“Arthur…. Let go, now, laddie.” Arthur’s chest pulses with that warmth again._

_He knows the name for that one._

_He takes a breath. Carbolic and lye mingles with sea spray and blood._

_His fingers twine with the Doctor’s. He closes his eyes._

_The warmth spreads from his chest to his shoulders, along his back, throbbing, burning, warming._

_Healing_.

 _Arthur lets go_.

_Somehow, when his wings manifest, they don’t collide with Bell’s._

_Not that anyone who chanced to be watching would have been able to discern that, sunlight bouncing off points of white and black as they did points of colour and light, back and forth, together and apart, apart and together._

_Arthur’s cheeks are wet with more than surf. When he opens his eyes, the face that gazes back at him is as streaked with tears as his own._

_The rain continues to fall, the gulls continue to scream, the surf continues to pound._

_Far below them, Neill’s body drifts further and further out to sea, a stream of red carried out upon the tide._

_Joe’s hand grasps Arthur’s neck with infinite care, that same care that exudes from the man’s very being, irregardless of time or circumstance._

_Their foreheads are numb with cold, but when they are pressed together, all Arthur can feel is warmth._

_Arthur knows the name of that warmth._

_It is called love._

00

It begins as it ended.

With flying.


End file.
